Teach for America thinks that language is “social justice,” and has designed a course that makes some startling claims about math.

“In western mathematics, our ways of knowing include formalized reasoning or proof, decontextualization, and algorithmic thinking, leaving little room for those having non-western mathematical skills and thinking processes,” the training course claims.

It continues:

“Mathematical ethics recognizes that, for centuries, mathematics has been used as a dehumanizing tool… mathematics formulae also differentiate between the classifications of a war or a genocide and have been used to trick indigenous peoples out of land and property.”

In fields of specialized knowledge, we aim to render an account that is plain and simple, yet does no violence to the difficulty of the subject, so that the uninformed reader can understand us while the expert cannot fault us. We try to keep in mind a saying attributed to Einstein—that everything must be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.

This word salad from Teach for America is nearly mindless:

“Mathematical ethics recognizes that, for centuries, mathematics has been used as a dehumanizing tool… mathematics formulae also differentiate between the classifications of a war or a genocide and have been used to trick indigenous peoples out of land and property.”

What the heck!?!?! Mathematical “ethics” is not even “parsable.” There is no “ethics” involved in mathematics nor is there any mathematics in ethics.

Of course, this Teach for America ugga-bugga-yoyoism is concocted as a ruse to feign meaning in a tempest of meaninglessness. Teach for America has simplified both ethics and mathematics to a level of simplicity that is not possible to reach.

So, forget the concept of ethics and look at the claim:

mathematics has been used as a dehumanizing tool

Cue the whole concept of Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence is nothing more or less than applied mathematics. The tacit inference of Teach For America is that “unethica”l mathematics must be eradicated.

“Figures don’t lie, but liars can figure.” That is a reference to how human minds manipulate numbers for “unethical” advantage. Its not the math that is “unethical” it is the users who are “unethical.”

So, there you have it: The STATE must locate and stomp out the people who use mathematics for other than STATE APPROVED purposes.

What this sounds like to me is a desire to overthrow all conventional reasoning in an attempt to negate the fact that most of the world has accepted westernized culture because it is assumed that all westernized culture is based upon white supremacist ideals. Here’s the thing: Galileo is attributed with the discovery of gravity only because his documentation of the concept is the only one that was had at its proliferation. Does that mean that no other human ever understood this concept before him? Is it possible an ancient Sumerian understood gravity? Most certainly it is possible. But we don’t have knowledge or evidence to back the claim. No one denies that an Australian native could have discovered gravity. The first documented evidence was from Galileo…that’s what we have, so we use it. Find the evidence of an African man discussing the concept thousands of years before that and that evidence can then be proliferated and integrated into modern teaching. No one is saying you have to attribute all knowledge to white men. Show the evidence. And too, understand that just because you think or believe a certain way doesn’t make it right…you may believe a person can shoot another person with lightning, but is there some universal observation making that true? What has happened to reality and reasoning?

So haven’t we been told for the last 20-odd years or so that algebra, calculus or one or more of the upper level mathematics concepts were developed by Muslims of African origin? Doesn’t that negate the “Western supremacy” claim that TFA is making? It sounds like a whole bunch of right-brained individuals stuck their noses into the left-brained world, of which they have zero knowledge of.

TAD, this is often a misconception about gravity. It isn’t that nobody knew gravity before Galileo. Obviously, everyone did: You let go of something, it drops. That’s gravity.

What Galileo did, however, was demonstrate that one of the assumptions being made about gravity (the more weight something had, the faster it fell) was false, by dropping two sphere from the top of the Tower of Pisa, one twice as heavy as the other, and observe, with witnesses, that both hit the ground at the same time.

See, Galileo did not run afoul of The Church, he ran afoul of the consensus science of Aristotle, because The Church was where all the scientists of the time were (yeah, governments weren’t about to put money into something that didn’t give them anything in return back then).

Nowadays, most scientists subsist on government or corporate grants, but while those with corporate grants are presumed to be giving out information only favorable to the corporation that provides the grant, those with government grants are presume to be free from giving out information favorable to an additional grab of governmental power. Yeah, right…